Free A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

don’t want to call them.”
    If Erin was being as prickly with them as she was with me, they might not want to come. Her reaction to being excluded from a few things was probably going to guarantee her being excluded from many more. I had to figure out some way to break the cycle.
    “I can call their moms. There’s nothing strange about that.”
    “It won’t do any good. Faith set up this schedule. Brittany had everyone last week. This week it’s Elise’s turn, then Rachel’s and then Faith’s again.”
    A schedule? A schedule of “everyone” that did not include Erin? To say nothing of the other seven girls in the ensemble? I could not believe that my friends were going to tolerate that. “Elise invited you to her house, didn’t she?”
    “Yeah, but I didn’t know if you would let me go.”
    Not let her go? Where had that come from? Why wouldn’t I let her go to Annelise and Elise’s house? “Of course you can go.”
    “It doesn’t matter.” Erin was mumbling, not looking at me. “Faith isn’t allowed to come to our house.”
    I couldn’t believe that I had heard her right. “What do you mean, she’s not allowed to come to our house?” Why would anyone not be
allowed
to come to our house? There’s always a parent here. We don’t have guns. The bathrooms and the dishes are clean … or clean enough.
    “I don’t know, that’s just what she’s telling the others, that she is not allowed to come here.”
    “She’s telling everyone that?” How must that make Erin feel, having some holier-than-thou kid implying that there was something so wrong with our house that she couldn’t set foot into it?
    “Don’t get into it, Mom.”
    Don’t get into it?
Fat chance of that.
    I called Mary Paige Caudwell that evening and asked her if she would like to get together for coffee one morning after we dropped the kids off at school. Normally I would have asked her to the house, but since she might be afraid of my house cooties, I suggested that we meet at Starbucks.
    “I’d love to get together,” she trilled, “but wouldn’t you rather go out to lunch?”
    Going out to lunch is still a symbol to me of women who are at home without enough to do. “Sure, we can do that. Do you want me to come over to Virginia?” A lot of us District residents have a phobia about going into Virginia because it always seems so far away, but Faith and Mary Paige lived right across the Chain Bridge, and Annelise and Blair had exclaimed several times how close their house really was.
    “Oh, there’s nothing over here.” And Mary Paige named a place in Georgetown.
    I agreed even though this meeting was now going to be a gigantic pain in the ass. I only live five miles from Georgetown, but parking is a chore. And the restaurant she named was not one that you went to in your meet-at-Starbucks sweats. So I was going to have to get dressed up, and, since I had initiated the invitation, no doubt pay for a very nice lunch.
    That afternoon Pam Ruby stopped by the house to return a stockpot. Pam, an alumna and a mother of sons, was a gossip, but she—unlike my friends and me—was sane enough not to be interested in the social activities of a bunch of eleven-year-olds. She gossiped about the lives of the adults, which meant that she must never talk about me because I clearly have no life.
    I asked her about Mary Paige.
    “Her sister was my year, but Mary Paige was a couple years ahead of us,” Pam answered. “So I didn’t really know her that well.”
    Which was not going to stop Pam from talking. Apparently Mary Paige had spent her married life in Houston, but she and her husband were separated and getting a divorce. “The money part really surprised her,” Pam said. “She saw lots of other women stay in their houses and keep their lifestyle after a divorce, but she wasn’t going to be able to. I guess the economy of Texas is really in the toilet.”
    Indeed it was, and my gun-for-hire husband was defending the men